a distress not exactly definable. She
felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right to
share his troubles. The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and
something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there
was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and
unwritten. They had vowed without priest or witness. The heart speaks
eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.

It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time,
that the words would never be spoken. And was this all that had troubled
her--the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life? Or had
she knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his
past?

This possibility filled him with bitterness. The old Adam in him awoke,
and he said within himself "God in heaven, must one folly, one sin,
kill me and her too? Why me more than another!... And I love her, I love
her!"

His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern.... There
came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with
her--anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over
again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have
his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness. For now he
was sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman
impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he
knew, he ever did directly to her. But to tell this girl, or even
her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful,
unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful
thing that happened--he who ministered at the altar! Now that he looked
the thing in the face it shocked him. No, he could not do it.

She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
possibility beyond her:

"Why do you look so? You are stern. You are critical. Have
I--disimproved so?"

The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
in herself had fallen in value. They had a pathos so much the more
moving because she sought to hide it.

There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she
herself had roused him when she came. He involuntarily, passionately,
caught her hand and pressed it to his lips